If there's one TWITTER account you must follow this Remembrance Day to honour Canada's war dead, it's @WeAreTheDead.

The tweetbot, reminds us of the soldiers who fought and died for this country, tweeting out the name of one soldier at 11 minutes after every hour.

Each Remembrance Day, The Citizen prepares a more detailed profile the soldier whose name is selected at random and tweeted at 11: 11 a.m. that day. The Citizen's Glen McGregor uses social media to crowdsource the obit.

On the first year of this project, The Citizen crowdsourced its profile of the dead Canadian soldier tweeted, Chancy Melvin Simpson. You can read about Simpson here.

In 2012, at 11:11 on Nov. 11, @WeAreTheDead tweeted the name John Cawley, a farmer who went to fight at Vimy Ridge and lost his life there. You can read a profile of this soldier here.

This year, The Citizen will continue the tradition and profile the Canadian soldier tweeted at 11:11 on Nov. 11. And again, McGregor will be using social media to crowd source a portrait of this soldier.

When the Citizen launched the account in 2011, here's the initiative was introduced.

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Though the poem may have worn from repetition, there is one line from In Flanders Fields that still commands our attention with its call, from the dead to the living, to remember.

"If ye break faith with us who die," wrote Lt.-Col. John McCrae, "We shall not sleep."

Starting on Nov. 9, 2011 and continuing well into the next decade, the Citizen will keep this ancient faith through the modern channel of social media.

Beginning at 11 minutes after 11 a.m. on Nov. 9, the Twitter account @WeAreTheDead began reciting the names of Canada's war dead, one each hour of every day.

A computer algorithm selects at random each name from an electronic scroll of military dead and posts to Twitter. It will take more than 13 years to tweet all the names, finishing sometime in late June 2025, depending on the number of new entries added to the list.

When the twitter account launched, Ottawa Citizen Managing Editor Andrew Potter said inspiration for the silent memorial came from Mc-Crae's call to remember forever those who fought for us, not just on Nov. 11.

"There is no reason why we should only do so once a year, when we march and mourn and pray and lament," he said. "Through this Twitter account, and through more extensive use of social media down the line, we hope to make the act of keeping faith a more subtle, but in many ways more permanent feature, of the lives of Canadians."

As Twitter allows updates of only 140 characters, each listing will offer only brief detail of the life lost - name, rank, unit, age, and date and location of death, where it is known.

Often, however, the age alone is the most compelling detail. Consider just these three names of the dead, that will be tweeted sometime in the coming years:

"Pilot Officer William Ferguson Reid (Royal Canadian Air Force). May 22, 1944, at Duisberg. Age: 21."

According to Veterans Affairs Canada records, Reid was from Rocky Mountain House, Alta. His brother, Thomas, a signalman, was killed in action the following year.

Paynter was an Ottawa grocery clerk who enlisted when he was just 15. He was killed in action at the Battle of the Somme, three days before his 17th birthday.

The list of names is drawn from a database the Ottawa Citizen obtained from Veterans Affairs through the Access to Information Act. It details more than 119,000 Canadians who died in service of the country, including those killed in the two World Wars, the Korean War, Afghanistan and on peacekeeping or peace-time duties.

The full database of Canada's military dead can be searched online on the Veterans Affairs website through the Virtual War Memorial.

It contains more verbose descriptions of those killed, some including photographs.

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